Ceremony

Ceremony is a story about storytelling and the power it holds. The novel begins with an extended verse section about the creation of the world, during which Ts’its’tsi’nako, the Thought-Woman, thinks the world into existence as a series of unfolding stories: For the Laguna Pueblo, stories create reality itself. The comparison of storytelling to pregnancy underscores the association between stories, creation, and life, as does the remark that stories are “all we have” to stave off death and illness (2).

The connection between narrative and life speaks in large part to the novel’s interest in Laguna Pueblo identity. Like many Indigenous American cultures, Laguna Pueblo society places great weight on oral tradition; the mere act of storytelling is thus a means of participating in and preserving that culture. The stories themselves are also vessels for Laguna Pueblo identity, reflecting shared values and beliefs. The mythical tale of Hummingbird and Greenbottle Fly is a good example. Josiah at one point references it to warn Tayo against killing flies, but the story also unfolds in the novel’s verse sections, where it mirrors and comments on Tayo’s journey. Silko thus uses the story to illustrate two ways in which stories create and perpetuate a culture: by providing members of that culture with a shared “language” in which to discuss their experiences and by integrating individual lives into a multigenerational, even timeless, narrative.

The life-giving or life-sustaining properties of stories therefore relate to their ability to connect people not only to a particular culture but also to people generally (by facilitating communication) and to the past and future (by contextualizing personal experiences within a bigger whole). “Witchery,” by contrast, aims to break these connections. Tayo’s science teacher disparages Indigenous stories in an overt attempt to destroy Indigenous culture and tradition; the doctors at the veterans’ hospital discourage Tayo from using “words like ‘we’ and ‘us’” to more subtly undercut Tayo’s sense of interconnectedness (116). Although such “destroyers” may use language to achieve their aims, their individualistic worldview is antithetical to storytelling in Silko’s sense of the word. As Ts’eh tells Tayo, “They want [the story] to end here, the way all their stories end, encircling slowly to choke the life away” (215).

What allows Tayo to prevail over this destruction is the recognition that it too is part of the story. At the mine, he sees the ore veins of uranium and other metals extracted for nuclear weapons as “ceremonial sand paintings” for the destroyers (228). When Tayo realizes this, he cries with relief because his experiences suddenly make sense: “[A]ll the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told” (229). Besides assuring Tayo that he is not “crazy,” this epiphany neutralizes witchery—from the war to colonialism to Tayo’s own self-destructive tendencies—by folding it into a larger narrative.